On Being Left-Handed in a Right Handed World

Last updated on: January 20, 2025 at 1:38 am by Ben Witherington

On Being Left-Handed in a Right Handed World 2025-01-08T21:26:05-05:00 Ben Witherington

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Needless to say, this is not real, it’s a joke. But in fact being left-handed in an overwhelmingly right handed world is not easy. There is a store in London that provides left-handed things for those of us who are such. I wish we had one somewhere near Lexington. A left-handed pair of scissors would be helpful.

We lefties make up only about 10% of the population, but a much larger percentage of the brainiacs. For example, 7 Presidents in the last one hundred years have been left handed—Herbert Hoover, Henry Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Or how about scientists or inventors– this list includes Da Vinci, Einstein, Marie Curie, or if you prefer rocket scientists and astronauts— Aldrin,Lovell, Duke, and Mitchell. Or how about painters and sculptors– Rubens, Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Lewis Carrol, and too many musicians to list, but here are some contemporary ones–Noel Gallagher, Sting, David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix. I could go on. I noticed something when I was named a Phi Beta Kappa in my junior year at UNC. Of the 50 or so getting the award that year (1973), a good 25 or them were left handed. How do I know? We all had to go to the podium and sign our names, and I watched very carefully to see who signed left handed. While a goodly number of people do some things left handed, hardly any were writing their signature or writing in general left-handed by choice, in an age before the personal computer. My third grade teacher even accused me of deliberately breaking my right arm when we were being taught cursive writing, so that I could write left-handed. She was wrong, but it was a common attitude, everyone needed to write right-handed, otherwise you smudge the page. I got excited in seminary when I learned Hebrew was a language written right to left. Hooray, a language I could write without smudging the page or the side of my hand.

Being a lefty in a right-handed world may be a plus in some sports, but not in general. Did you know no one is ever called someone’s ‘left hand man’. It’s always ‘my right hand man’. And did you know that in antiquity if you were on the right hand of the ruler— you had an exalted spot, like Jesus on the right hand of the Father in heaven. No wonder the sheep went to the right and the goats to the left in that parable.

And then there is the Latin word sinistra meaning left from which we get sinister. Here’s what Wiki tells us “Historically, the left side, and subsequently left-handedness, was considered negative in many cultures. The Latin word sinistra originally meant “left” but took on meanings of “evil” or “unlucky” by the Classical Latin era, and this double meaning survives in European derivatives of Latin, and in the English word “sinister”. And ‘right’ became the English word used to indicate, correct or proper. The anecdotal rebuttal. was ‘only left-handed people are in their right mind’. There were whole ancient cultures who were suspicious of left-handed people. In the ANE, when they built city gates they would build them, assuming the attackers would be overwhelmingly right handed, which meant they had to throw their spears over their own shoulders to aim at the enemy on the city wall. The Greek had suspicions about left-handed people as did the Romans later, and I could go on. It’s been an uphill climb for lefties. And I am one of them. My dad taught me to play golf, but we could not afford left handed clubs. The end result was I learned to play right-handed, and I also batted right handed in baseball, while catching and throwing left-handed. But in basketball it was all left-handed all the time. No wonder it was my favorite sport to play, and which I was good at growing up. Then finally think of some our common terms– the left behind, or the left out. It’s no fun being left out. That’s for sure. Thank goodness some of my favorite sports stars, like Sandy Koufax were left handed, or Lionel Messi who is left footed.

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